


Honey

by elephant_eyelash



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: Character Death, Future Fic, Gen, Implied/Referenced Incest, Next Generation, as glum as alan bennett standing in the rain with soggy chips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-28
Updated: 2013-09-28
Packaged: 2017-12-27 20:59:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/983557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elephant_eyelash/pseuds/elephant_eyelash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sybbie Branson and George Crawley discuss their ghosts, curses, and what could have been.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Honey

I was comforted by the fact she dipped honey in her tea as she had always done. I watched it slowly slip away from the tip of her spoon, and remembered (or reimagined) summer days with honey cakes and the sound of bee flight in our ears with us together. It illuminated, if only for a moment, that tired old cafe where we now sat on the Strand. I replaced the ugly sound of the steel hitting the cheap, worn china with the echoes of summer games that she, always, dictated. I followed her willingly then, into patches of overgrown forest where she promised adventure, into abandoned rooms that hosted fine grains of dust yellowed by the sun, more and more ready to go into her world, be consumed by it.

But we were old now. There was an age to her voice. There was a hesitancy in every action. Even the dipping of honey now seemed ponderous and considered when as a child she would ladle it on her tea in greedy spoonfuls.

I always had my tea stronger than hers’. Bitter, like my mother liked it.

A bus roared past, disturbing the surface of the tea and her reflection within it. But as always, she appeared before me again: beautiful and terribly sad, a composite of my idea of the tragic woman (what else did I paint but her, really?), only without blooms of fuchsia and the rolling landscapes of legend.

She twisted her earring. It bought me with a shudder to the colourless present. Around her a curtain of fine rain lay on the dirty cafe window, there was the smell of stale smoke and the feeling of damp in our bones and clothes.

"The funeral is next Tuesday." I said, realising I hadn’t talked for a while. Her eyes fixed on the floor.

"Strange. I always imagined Auntie Edith living forever." She said.

"Will you come?"

She smiled a little sadly and shrugged.

"She would have liked it, you know, you were always her favourite." I said. I noticed her fingernails scratching against the table, and knew perhaps I had been pushing too hard, that she was anxiously considering her retreat already. My mother used to roll her eyes and say she was glad Sybbie didn’t have wings, because then we would never find a way of catching her. The idea of my dear Syb as an angel appealed to my artistic imagination, and soon she seemed to appear in all the art I consumed, from the smooth faces of Vermeer’s music students to patterns of condensation in my bedroom window.

"Don’t wait for me, if I’m not there." She said. "You know what I’m like."

"Yes." I said. I dipped my finger in some spilt sugar, felt the vibrations of the buses beneath my feet.

"I just hate those kind of events, you know. Weddings, baptisms…The thought of putting on a fancy dress and standing still for hours, quietly. Not quite like me, is it? No." She said. "Maybe I’ll remember Auntie Edith in my own way. Write a novel, but I’m useless at that, no, I am not creative like you two."

"No, you were always the practical sort." I concede. Memories flutter between us, silently. She sat back a little in her chair and sighed. We were both nearly forty years old. Syb had on a tatty old coat that makes me worry (but really she is fine, self sufficient: she is the sort to wear a coat until it is no more than a scrap) and smoked roll-ups (I could see Grandpapa’s face somewhere there in the crawling blue smoke, horrified at her yellow fingertips and the hint of an Irish accent on some words). I paint and am celebrated for it, but I have no heir and get in (and here I quote my dear deceased mother directly) "those dark, funny moods". I am thick and clumsy with my words and fidget too much with my hands

I considered the fact that I was, perhaps, witnessing in these small things the disintegration of our family line and could help but chuckle.

Syb raised an eyebrow, and I offered in explanation: “We are funny aren’t we? Hundreds of years of family history accumulating in this moment. We are shameful.”

She smiled a little at me, and an old energy seemed to return to her eyes. She lit. “Do you remember when we were younger, and we talked of ‘The Curse’?”

I smiled. “Yes, I remember. We would go to the graveyard, because you said we were one of the dead already.”

"I just did it to frighten you."

"And it worked."

We both fell quiet for a time, as if we needed to end the brief intimacy suddenly enjoyed by the shared memory. Syb finished her cigarette before lighting another one and tilted her head so as study the green tiles of the cafe walls. I thought, glumly, of the sight of that old church not as a playground of my (no, our) youth but as a flat, empty space of ceremony.

"I told you we had to run, you know." Syb said, her words floating, shapeless. "That that was the only way to break the curse- to get away from that house." She looked at me. In her eyes there was a sharpness that only she can conjure, an effect no one else but she and my mother could produce in me. "But you didn’t run, did you? I did, and thought you’d follow, eventually. But you stayed. I couldn’t fathom it. Still can’t."

I realised then that I had finished my tea. My hands shook a little at a loss of something to occupy them. What would these hands do, truly, if they wanted. Strike her for her cruelty? Grab her and not let her go? Caress her lip, especially that scar just underneath she got from falling off the bike that summer (the accident I am still convinced was my fault)? But my body betrayed me. It is a jumble of different messages, impulses, emotions - it renders me immobile whereas for Syb, my dear Syb, it allows her to remain in an endless motion that I can only watch and admire, but never participate in.

My cup stayed on the table. As children Syb would pretend to read our fortunes in the tea leaves. In hushed whispers she told me of our adventures in the pyramids of Egypt and the jungle of the Amazon together. I would listen, rapt. In the nursery we would plot the details, hands clasped together: we would take the family horses, we would take the car, we would fly away from here.

"Take care, Syb." I said, ungraciously pushing over money for the tea. I know she will not come- I can feel her absence in the house already, the space where she used to be.


End file.
